Dreams of Rivers and Seas
Page 34
Paul kept his hand over hers and pressed with a certain urgency. ‘You really mustn’t, Elaine.’ It was the first time he had used her name. He began to tell her about the time he had told his first wife he was having an affair. ‘Later I realised I just wanted to hurt her. It was a kind of punishment. I made her unhappy for nothing.’
‘I just don’t know,’ the girl repeated. ‘Life is too complicated. I never thought it would be like this.’
‘Let’s smoke a hookah!’ Paul suggested, withdrawing his hand. He smiled and had ordered one before she had even understood what a hookah was. While he was still explaining, a waiter brought the heavy pipe over from the bar and made an elaborate show of cleaning the mouthpiece. The bowl was already lit.
‘Just suck deep through the bubbles,’ Paul told her. ‘The smoke goes through the water, you see. It’s nicer than a cigarette, especially if you’re not used to smoking.’
Elaine made another attempt to cheer up. ‘It looks like a cross between a candlestick and a vacuum cleaner,’ she laughed.
The bar was getting busy and they had to raise their voices. She took the mouthpiece between pouting lips and made Paul laugh sucking in her cheeks and going cross-eyed. As she let go, a great dizziness passed over her.
‘God!’ she had to shake her head and sit back. She closed her eyes for a few moments, then opened them laughing. ‘You’ve still got my pink scarf on. You look really funny.’
‘I’m getting used to it,’ Paul grinned.
Then almost indignantly she told him. ‘I’ve talked too much about me. I feel like I’m giving myself away and you haven’t said anything about you. It’s not fair.’
‘So what do you want to know?’
Elaine sucked on the pipe again. ‘Who you are,’ she said evenly.
‘That’s a long story.’
‘Tell me.’
Paul ordered two more drinks. ‘You’ll be bored,’ he warned. He took a rather melodramatically deep breath. ‘In a nutshell, I was a mother’s boy in an extremely religious family. When I was small they expected me to be a clergyman. But really, it was a sort of school for lying. I mean, when people demand perfect behaviour, what can you do but pretend you’re better than you are? To please them. Then there comes the day, of course, when you want to punish everyone for all the effort it’s been.’
Because Paul had said all these things so many times before to so many girls, he had the feeling as he spoke that he was simultaneously both present and not present, honest and dishonest. He was in the bar with Elaine, smoking a hookah, drinking vodka, very aware of the girl’s breasts and the scaffolding of her bra, but he was also at a considerable remove, he was calmly observing himself with her, or with some other girl perhaps at some other moment in the past. With Amy even. And quite probably Helen James was beside him in that observation post, wherever it was; yes, Helen was at his elbow as he listened to himself talking so charmingly and persuasively to Elaine; and while he talked, the older woman was passing ironic remarks, sarcastic remarks, because she saw through everything; she saw through his spiel, and she kept warning him to cut the bullshit. But she was enjoying it too, Paul thought. And he was enjoying her remarks, however cutting they were. He knew that deep down Helen didn’t really want him to change at all, she didn’t want him to become a good man. It was a sort of competition and Helen was actually using those ironic remarks as a way of getting control of him, a form of seduction maybe, just as he in a quiet way, almost against his will really, was casting nets for the girl. ‘Liberation from what into what?’ Albert James had written in that early email. Perhaps there is no space, Paul suddenly found himself thinking, beyond compulsion and persuasion. Unless death maybe.
‘I suppose it’ll sound like I’ve had loads of girlfriends,’ he wound up a few minutes later, amused and apologetic, ‘but the truth is, in a funny way, it was always them who had me. You know? Really. Then as soon as I’m with someone, as soon as I’m supposed to be faithful to them, you can be sure I’m planning to betray them already. I guess it’s just a way of behaving I learned.’
‘You could unlearn it,’ Elaine said, sucking on the hookah again.
‘Easier said than done,’ he sighed. ‘Though, actually, that’s pretty much why I was thinking I’d do this aid work out in Bihar. I’ll live like a monk for a while. Out of harm’s way.’ Paul meant it and simultaneously saw at once what a good line it was.
‘Sounds like a cop-out.’ Elaine protested. She was speaking in a louder voice now. The alcove was blue with smoke and her hair was mussed from constantly pushing her hand into it. She had drunk a lot. ‘I think you should go back and marry this Amy,’ she told him seriously, ‘and force yourself to make a go of it.’ Growing more heated, she didn’t appear to be aware when their ankles brushed against each other for a moment under the table.
Towards one Paul called for the bill. ‘You must be tired,’ he told her. Outside, a doorman held a huge umbrella and steered them arm in arm into a taxi. Elaine slid across the seat. ‘The India International Centre,’ Paul announced.
‘International Centre, sir. Where is that sir?’
‘Lodhi Gardens,’ Paul said.
The taxi was an old Fiat. The rain drummed on its thin roof. The engine had a hoarse, rasping sound and the suspension slumped alarmingly to the driver’s side.
‘Typical,’ Paul murmured.
They had barely got to Tolstoy Marg before the vehicle coughed and died at a traffic light. Elaine giggled. She was sitting close to him. The driver turned the ignition key, muttering to himself as the starter motor turned and turned. After four or five attempts the thing shuddered into life. At the next traffic light it stalled again.
‘Everything okay?’ Paul enquired.
‘Very okay. Very normal, sir. Older car, sir. Carburettor.’
‘What a darling rattletrap,’ Elaine laughed. In a low voice in Paul’s ear she did a perfect imitation of the man ‘Very okay, very normal, sir. Older car for older man, sir.’
Paul squeezed her arm. They proceeded along a broad road glistening with muddy water and littered with broken twigs. The driver had a young, rather sullen face under an untidy blue head-cloth. He seemed offended that Paul had doubted his vehicle. Perhaps he had caught a snatch of Elaine’s imitation. ‘It is always starting again, sir,’ he pronounced with sour dignity. ‘You are not worrying now.’
Elaine burst into giggles.
The girl half leaning against him, Paul wondered what would happen when they arrived at the International Centre. He didn’t greatly care. My career is at sea, he thought. He had never started a project and given up before. It was curious that he wasn’t more concerned. And I don’t miss Amy at all, he reflected.
Then, as they passed India Gate, the park empty tonight in the heavy rain, he remembered something Helen had said when they had sat together on the grass that evening: ‘It would be dangerous, for someone like you to follow Albert too far,’ she had said.
The car was coughing and shuddering again. All at once Elaine’s fingers were at his neck. ‘You look too silly with that scarf.’ She couldn’t shake off this attack of the giggles. ‘I can’t believe you’re still wearing it!’
Her face was very close to his as she sat up and leaned over to untie the pink silk. He could feel her drunken breath on his lips. He was protesting half-heartedly, ‘Don’t pull, Jesus, you’ll strangle me! Ouch.’
Their mouths were really very close. Then the car cut again. Not at a light this time but while they were accelerating away from one. The driver steered the vehicle through a deep puddle towards the kerb.
Elaine sat back with a jolt, still laughing. Cursing under his breath, the driver began to punish the starter motor. After a dozen attempts, Paul said: ‘I think we’d better find another car.’
‘Not at all, sir. All very normal.’
‘God,’ Elaine returned to earth, ‘I’m so exhausted.’
‘Just one moment, sir. Old car. Always starts.’
‘It is raining very hard, sir,’ the driver said.
Paul paid him up to this point and they got out. They had no umbrella but the rain was warm. By the time Elaine had walked round the car and slipped an arm under his, they were already drenched. ‘Old car!’ she mimicked giggling. ‘Always starts!’
CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE
‘DEAR PAUL.’
The letter was not addressed to him.
John had had a premonition. He had woken in pitch darkness and for a long time had absolutely no idea where he was. He wasn’t frightened. He wasn’t concerned. On the contrary, he woke to an intense sense of well-being, of healing. You are not ill, he decided. After all. There has been no catastrophe. Then he realised it was the well-being that follows a nightmare. Yes. He had been reading messages of love, on his phone, but they were not addressed to him. There was another man’s name. Elaine was beside him as he read the messages; she knew that he knew, but she wasn’t embarrassed. ‘I must have sent them to the wrong phone,’ she says. They were messages of passion. She wasn’t even anxious. She hugged him just the same as if this were a matter of no importance. They were in bed and John kept reading these messages over and over; messages not only addressed to a different person but in a different language, of which he knew not a word, in a different script in fact, made up not so much of letters but of tiny insects, flowers, shoes, animals, a beautifully symmetrical script inlaid in the screen of his phone, beautifully coloured, incomprehensible messages of love – a love I will never understand, he thought – forming and re-forming in the kaleidoscope of his phone. Elaine was beside him, smiling and mocking and he woke into pitch darkness and a huge sense of relief.
Just a nightmare. No catastrophe.
But somebody is beside him. John could feel a light pressure against his back. It’s a feminine pressure, he thought. He smelled it. He lay completely relaxed. A great wave of awfulness had passed over him, flowed through and over him, leaving him whole and at ease and breathing freely.
Something bad is over, he thought. The air is fresh. I’m better. The window must be open. Finally he made out the contours of the room in the dark. Yes. This room. The Govind. He was perturbed. He twisted a little, then stopped. His hand felt behind him. The girl. What was her name?
Jasmeet.
Now the passage to reality was as abrupt and cruel as that from nightmare to waking had been healing and kind. He slipped, almost fell out of bed. I’m fully dressed, he realised. What had happened?
He stumbled to the bathroom and turned the light on. His wash kit was all over the place: on the shower plate, in the sink, on the floor. His razor was in the toilet. Somebody has smeared the small mirror with toothpaste.
He stared at the pink scrawl. A terrible thought possessed him and he rushed back into the bedroom. Filtered through the doorway, the fluorescent tube in the bathroom made a ghostly shape of her body on the bed. In a few swift paces he was beside her. She was still. He lowered his head. Still, but breathing. Jasmeet was sleeping soundly, breathing sweetly, fully dressed.
Again he felt a flood of relief. The girl is beautiful. She is a child of God, he muttered. Why did those pious words come to him? John isn’t remotely religious. Remembering something, he looked up at the wall. There is no writing. There are no animals or monsters. He glanced at the table, the shelves. The computer was gone. Yes. That had really happened, then. The theft had happened. And my phone, and the pashmina shawl. They had been on the bed. You should have reported it. At least to the hotel.
Suddenly, he rushed round the bed again and bent down to examine her face. There is a small cut on the lower lip, a bruise in the brown skin.
You had some kind of fit, he told himself. You did things without knowing. The thought alarmed him. Violent things. You weren’t yourself. You slapped her perhaps. John had never hit anyone. He wasn’t that sort of person. But the girl had stayed all the same. She’s a courageous kid, he thought. He didn’t know what to think. Perhaps she likes you. He saw the shiny red purse belted to her waist. She lay on her side. Perhaps she has nowhere else to go. What a perfect creature! She slept with your father, John thought.
He checked his watch. It is quarter to six. Sure enough the window was greying with light. The day will come quickly. I must have slept, what, twelve hours? Maybe more. I must have collapsed. Jasmeet could easily have left. She could easily have helped herself to whatever she wanted of his. Instead she had laid him on the bed and then laid down beside him. She must be quite strong to have dragged him there. Unless he’d gone himself without remembering. He watched her and it seemed to him now that the girl was taking pleasure in her sleep. She was enjoying sleep like a fragrant bath, or a gentle massage. She sighed and stirred and wriggled and a warm smell of breath and skin filled the air.
John stepped back. He wanted to be out before she woke. He felt lucid now, but fragile, volatile, hungry. He was ravenously hungry.
Where are my sandals?
One lay on the floor beside one of Jasmeet’s. He stared at her small elegant white sandal. A child’s. Where is his other? He doesn’t want to have to talk to her and explain himself. The girl threatened him somehow. That little sandal threatened him.
John hunted about. Where is it? Ah, under the bed. Breathing deeply he crouched down and pulled it out, then slipped the thing on his foot and hurried downstairs. ‘I’m just going to a cash machine to get money for my bill,’ he told the receptionist. It was the same woman who had asked him to settle yesterday. She didn’t raise her head from her bowl of petals.
John found a cash dispenser at the second corner. His fingers tapped the codes. The money came. It was reassuring. Just as on the Edgware Road. The notes were crisp and colourful.
Then, at the first food stand, he wolfed down doughy bread and some kind of yoghurt and three small fried cakes. ‘That,’ he pointed, ‘and this and this and this.’ He paid no attention to the names of things, no attention at all to hygiene. He stopped at another stand and ate again. He ate fried things, he ate meat, pastry, again something sweet. The food stuck to his teeth. It filled his mouth. He couldn’t remember feeling so hungry, eating so fast.
Stomach crammed, he set off into Old Delhi. The city was bright now, gleaming and steaming in the warm morning dampness. It must have rained hard. Everywhere surfaces were broken and reflected in puddles. Vaguely, he remembered the premonitory lightning. He had looked out of the window, yes, and seen snakes in the sky.
Now he stopped at a fruit stand and bought bananas, peaches. Then at a tea counter. Sweet chai. It was horrible. I’ll burst, John thought, but he felt good. Leaning on the counter of the tea stand he saw how every tree and wall and car was lacquered with bright wet light. There was the heavy shape and there was its surface which was dazzlingly bright despite all the dirt. The place was filthy, but dazzling. This is definitely positive, John decided. All will be well.
To his left, a monkey squatted on a step at the opening to a narrow alley. It was pleasingly dark. I’m not far from the Sufi tombs here, he realised. He recalled the street, or thought he did. He remembered the men with the strange alien chant, the hypnotic drumming. Drumming too is a sort of dazzling mesh, cast over heavy things, things that won’t move. ‘After hundreds of years the tomb of the prophet and poet is still a magnet for the faithful’ – he remembered someone saying that, over the beat of the drums, someone talking like a tourist brochure.
I must have had a fit, John told himself. I fell into a fit the way you fall into a hole and wake up in hospital. It was lucky he hadn’t done any serious damage. I must apologise to Jasmeet, he told himself. Apologise profusely. Yes, I’ll help her get her ticket to London. We can travel together. Mother will come too. They would be a happy threesome.
He paid the chai wallah. Now he felt stron
g. He walked swiftly past men steering long barrows through the narrow streets. Meat and market produce, bricks and buckets and bicycle tyres. It was extraordinary how long these barrows were. Everything clattered. Everything seemed heavy and painfully bright. How on earth did they push them? And now a man was crossing the traffic with five or six crates on his head.
I had hallucinations, John realised. But all of Delhi is an endless hallucination.
He found the railway station, pushed through a dense, jostling crowd outside, stopped by a wall, puzzled, trying to remember. Eventually he found his way through the early morning travellers, crossed the long bridge over the lines and turned left.
Yes, it was here he had seen the girl picking fleas out her mother’s hair. They too had been beating a drum. Where was the name of the street? It was getting seriously warm. Why wouldn’t they put the street names somewhere visible? I’ve eaten too much, he thought.
Then he saw an address on a shop front, 405 Shadhanad Marg. Good. On a corner, Jasmeet had said. It was a long road, stretching off in a bright haze by the railway line. Mum will arrive around seven, he told himself, knowing her. She started her days early. He wouldn’t have long to wait. I feel ready for anything, he decided.
Perhaps ten minutes later he spotted the big red cross on a roughly whitewashed brick wall. The street was a sludge of debris and decay. Here and there dogs and other animals were snuffling and rooting. A small pig was dead in the gutter. Crows were gathering. They perched on the rusty fence by the railway line.
I must see her before I have another attack, he was telling himself. He had lost any sense of what was to be said or why. Salvation lay in finding Mother, in confronting her, in taking her back to England. Then he will never lose himself again.
There was a padlocked gate on the corner and already a dozen people were squatting outside, trying to keep clear of the mud. This must be it. They are waiting for outpatients, John told himself. They are waiting to visit their sick relatives.